The 15 Most Annoying Video Game Characters

I came across a list on Cracked discussing 15 of the most annoying video game characters gamers have ever had to deal with. I revamped that list and removed/added a few characters as I saw fit.

15 – BABY MARIO from Yoshi’s Island … It was discouraging enough getting bit or whatever by an enemy, but then to have baby Mario’s screams blasting through our television’s mono sound system was just salt to the wound.

Also, I bet you never thought of it all like this,

14 – TAILS from Sonic the Hedgehog…I never had a problem with Tails. Then again I did not play Sonic all that much, but I always picked Tails over Sonic when I did play. The author of the Cracked article complained that Tails was always, “unable to keep up with Sonic’s momentum…” Well, Tails never was supposed to be as fast as Sonic…that’s why Sega made Tails able to fly.

13 – SLIPPY TOAD from Star Fox…the only thing Slippy was good for was bringing up the health-level readings of the level bosses so we could know how close they were to exploding. As if we couldn’t tell by the amount of fires, debris falling off, and random electrical explosions. Even young, sweet, 9-year-old H3rcules would sometimes assist Andross’ fiends in shooting this frog-man down, just to be able to fight in peace for a few levels.

12 – ASHLEY GRAHAM from Resident Evil 4…I did not get around to playing RE4 for whatever reason. The Cracked author, who I guess I should point out is Tim Lovett, claims that…*spoiler alert*…when she is recaptured it was as if a weight had been lifted off of his shoulders. Sounds pretty bad to me.

11 – RAIDEN from Metal Gear Solid… Ok, this guy just got a crappy deal. He was the surprise replacement to Solid Snake (easily one of the gaming world’s most badass characters) and he was the “new guy”. Think of how much resentment would have been generated if Star Wars started out by telling the story of Han Solo, and then once he met Luke in the cantina, it switched over to telling Luke’s story. People would have been pissed to go from thinking they were going to go on this adventure with a badass space mercenary, and then the story suddenly switched to a whiny farmboy out to prove himself.

The game Raiden made his appearance in was Sons of Liberty, which was the first Metal Gear game I played. I never found Raiden annoying at all, I enjoyed the game and enjoyed playing the game as Raiden.

10 – NATALYA from Goldeneye…and I’m adding a runner up: Dr. Caroll from Perfect Dark…both of these wonderful A.I. creations were brought to us by Rare. I always wondered how Rare screwed up with these two lovely polygon clumps of stupidity. The enemy A.I. in the games were smarter than your allies.

Playing through Goldeneye with Natalya was like escorting a dementia patient blindfolded through a theme park full of people trying to kill you both. With Dr. Caroll…there would be times I’d find that little flying computer floating around in a room I never even went in, catching bullets like they were candy falling from the sky. Also, how stupid was it that they put eye-balls on the computer screen?

9 – JOHN MADDEN from EA Sports Madden NFL… John Madden is annoying in real life, why would he be any different in his video game? “What this team needs to do now is they need to focus on the game and hope to score some points. If they score enough, they could win the game. It all depends on how well they play.”

Close runner up: The ANNOUNCER from Pokemon Stadium… the dude offered no insight into what was going on, except when something was super effective or missed. Like we had to be reminded that if a giant dragon-snake barfed water onto a fire-pony, that that the result would be “super effective.” It was as if the announcer was just reading the names of the buttons you pressed to make your Slowpoke drool some more. “Announcer tries to be creative! Announcer’s brain melts. And there goes the battle!”

8 – NAVI from The Legend of Zelda… HEY! LISTEN! Isn’t it annoying when you get bossed around by a Christmas decoration?

7 – TINGLE from The Legend of Zelda…I would say Tingle was just a bad translation of something that was probably funny in Japan, and was just awkward for people in the United States. A grown man in tights thinking he is a fairy? Definitely would not see anything like that in the United States.

6 – DAXTER from Jak and Daxter…this is another one I am going to disagree with. So in it’s place I’m substituting ALL THE VOICES FROM BANJO-KAZOOIE from Banjo-Kazooie. When I was a kid, I used to laugh at Jar-Jar Binks. I never, ever was entertained by the character voices from Banjo-Kazooie. It was that bad. For those of you who are unaware, while games like Star Fox 64 had frog-men crying at me to save his slimey butt, I could understand him because it was in English. For whatever reason, Rare decided to be “creative” and made the voices in Banjo-Kazooie just like…onomonopias. Let me demonstrate…

When Kazooie (the bird) talked, it sounded like: Roggle-roggle-croggle-roggle-croggle-scroggle.

When Tooty (the girl bear) talked, it sounded like: Oh!-umm-uhh-oh!-uhhh.

When Banjo (the boy bear) talked, it sounded like: Durp-durp-hurp-durp-duh-durp-durp.

When Gruntilda (the witch) talked, it sounded like: Reh-rah-reh-reh-rah-heh-rah-rah-heh-rah

When Bottles (the mole) talked, it sounded like: Someone was cleaning a window.

5 – MR. RESETTI from Animal Crossing…I’m not a girl, I’ve never played this game. But he does look rather annoying. Mr.Loveitt declared Mr.Resetti to be annoying for hammering the player to remember to save their progress, all the time. To me, that’s much more useful then anything any of these other video game lepers can offer.

4 – COPS in Road Rash (or any game with law-enforcement in it)… It is a lose-lose situation for cops in video games. If they do their job well…they’re annoying. If they don’t do their job well…they’re morons. The same can even be said for games like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where the town guards can smell you picking a lock from a half-mile away and can instantly teleport directly behind you the moment you finish plundering that turkey leg. But then the guardsmen in World of Warcraft will steadfastly do their duty, guarding the front gates of the Undercity never once leaving their posts, while the Alliance pigs come pouring threw the sewers.

3 – WALUIGI in Mario Tennis…ehh, idk about this one either. Sure he resembles a villain from a 1920’s black-and-white film…but that doesn’t really make him annoying. I never thought Waluigi or Wario were annoying at all. Peach and Toad were always the more annoying ones in any game that involved that whole Nintendo crew.

In Waluigi’s place, I nominate THE SIMS from The Sims…All of them. The collective population of Sim City or wherever these mumbling people live. You have to train these human beings to flush the toilet. To not put empty dishes on the floor. To leave the house when it is on fire. To not go to work in pajamas. Sure you could get lucky and get a Sim who likes to be clean, but the game makes it so that there is rarely a balanced normal Sim around, and suddenly your nice and neat Sim is slamming the neighbor’s kid in the face with a shovel for digging up the garden.

2 – [Editor’s note: The original author made #2 based on the games where racers that use “comeback A.I.” to keep up with you in a race, thereby breaking the article and listing a mechanic, rather than a character] I nominated VANILLE from Final Fantasy 13. This girl has been annoying to no end. I’ve only gotten about 6 hours into FF13 and I still can’t stand her. She is just way too happy about things for me to like. Maybe that goes to say something about my personality, but probably not. She is too anime-always-happy, and I believe, like Tingle, that is just something that is lost in translation coming from Japan.

1 – THE DOG from Duck Hunt. Just like the law-enforcement conundrum, if the dog was easy to kill, he would be “that dumb dog” but because he isn’t, he’s “that bastard dog.” He was one of the first video game characters to annoy gamers, and for that, he wins.